Cucumber.js with zombie.js

I wanted to start looking at alternatives to our current set of cucumber feature tests. At the moment on the web team we're using using FireWatir and Capybara. So I though I'd take at look at what was available in Node.js. Many people think it's strange that a .Net shop would use a something written for testing Ruby or even consider something that isn't from the .Net community. Personally I think it's a benefit to truly look at something form the outside in. Should it matter what you're using to drive your end product or what language your using to test it? Not really. So what are the motivations for moving away from Ruby, Capybara and FireWatir? In a word 'flaky', we've had heaps of issues getting our feature tests, AATs and smoke tests reliable. When it comes to testing, consistency should be king. They should be as solid as your unit tests. If they fail you want to know that for definite you've broken something, rather than thinking it's a problem with the webdriver. It is with this aim in mind that I started looking at the following. Cucumber.js is definitely in it's infancy, there's lots of stuff missing but there's enough there to get going. Zombie.js is a headless browser, it claims to be insanely fast, no complaints here. First up we got something working with the current implementation of cucumber-js https://github.com/antonydenyer/zombiejsplayground. The progress formatter works fine and the usual "you can implement step definitions for undefined steps" are a real help. Interestingly rather than requiring zombie.js in our step definitions we ended up going down the route of implementing our own DSL inside world.js. We could have used another DSL like capybara to protect us from changing the browser/driver we use. This is currently done with our Ruby implementation, the problem is that we've ending up implementing our own hacks to get round the limitations/flakiness of selnium/webdriver and to date we have never 'just swapped out the driver' to see what happens when they run against chrome/ie. That said should you be using cucumber tests to test the browser? I don't think you should. With that in mind we ended up implementing directly against zombie.js from our own DSL. Extending cucmber-js https://github.com/antonydenyer/cucumber-js There are a lot things yet to be implemented in cucmber.js one that gives me great satisfaction is the pretty formatter. Look everything is green! It's no where near ready for production but you do get a nice pretty formatter. Thanks to Raoul Millais for helping out with command line parsing and general hand holding around JavaScript first steps.

Today marks the beginning of the Technical Academy Tour as Academy Coordinator, Miles Pool, VP Technology, Paul Shannon and later, former apprentice, Mia Filisch head out across the UK to talk about our Technical Academy.

Continuous learning has always been part of the culture at 7digital and the Technical Academy allowed us to focus those ideas and start hiring apprentices. Changing the team entry requirements and providing a defined period of training allowed us to attract people from more diverse backgrounds and has increased the proportion of female developers in our team; it’s also strengthened the culture of learning and knowledge sharing at every level.

Since I started at 7digital I’ve loved our belief in continuous improvement. Throughout our history as a company we have had a number of influential women working in various parts of organisation yet I knew there was more we could do to improve the diversity of our tech team.

Here at 7digital, we see the relationship between the customer and the developer as one of the most important aspects of software development. We treat software development as more of a craft than an engineering discipline. Craftsmen back in the day would have constant communication with their customers, receiving regular visits from their customer to discuss progress and alterations as the item takes shape.

Over the last twenty years, the agile software movement and extreme programming in particular has championed this with its short iterations, customer showcases and active customer participation in the creation of features.

7digital software developer Mia Filisch attended the October 28th Velocity conference in Amsterdam. She was kind enough to share her account of the core takeaways here with us. She found that the core recurring theme around security was enough to inspire some internal knowledge sharing sessions she has already started scheming on. The diversity of insights led to a productive and informative conference. See below for her notes.